What’s on TV Wednesday: ‘Snowfall’ and ‘The Boss Baby’

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“Snowfall,” the latest entry into the golden-age TV genre of drug dramas, has its premiere on FX. And “The Boss Baby,” in which Alec Baldwin lends his gravelly voice to an animated infant character, is streaming on iTunes.

What’s on TV

SNOWFALL 10 p.m. on FX. “Weeds” had marijuana; “Breaking Bad” had meth. Now “Snowfall” has crack cocaine. The new drama aims to tell the sprawling story of the drug’s rise in the United States. In the premiere episode, three plotlines briefly intersect but largely remain separated. Their common thread, James Poniewozik wrote in The New York Times, is that “each story involves a morally conflicted person in a business that rewards the ruthless, convincing him- or herself that he or she can get just dirty enough to succeed, but no more.” (Sound familiar, fans of “Weeds” and “Breaking Bad”?) “We know how well that usually goes,” Mr. Poniewozik added. “We know very, very much about how all these stories go, which is a problem.”

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SHUTTER ISLAND (2010) 8 p.m. on IFC. Martin Scorsese’s moody mystery has cinematic nods to masters of the genre: Alfred Hitchcock, mainly, as well as the Italian director Mario Bava. “The movie’s central dramatic problem — the unstable boundary between the reality of Shutter Island and Teddy’s perception of it — becomes less interesting as the story lurches along,” A. O. Scott wrote in The Times, referring to Leonardo DiCaprio’s character. There is plenty of narrative misdirection, he added, but the red herrings take too long to introduce. “Just when the puzzle should accelerate, the picture slows down,” Mr. Scott wrote.

What’s Streaming

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THE BOSS BABY (2017) on iTunes. Have you missed Alec Baldwin’s deep-voiced executive character on “30 Rock”? He’s back, sort of — as a (bossy, as the title suggests) cartoon infant. The jokes are more for adults than children, though. “The contrast between the helpless-infant stage of life and corporate-speak is funny but fairly high-concept for a kiddie movie,” Neil Genzlinger wrote in The Times, “and the plot grows denser as it goes along.” The baby and his 7-year-old brother “reluctantly join forces to stop a conspiracy by which puppies would corner all the love in the world.”

BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S (1961) on Amazon. Blake Edwards’s adaptation of Truman Capote’s novella about a gay writer fascinated by his carefree and complex neighbor, Holly Golightly, strays from the source material for a sweeter Hollywood feel: The writer is straight, and they get their happily-ever-after in the film’s final moments. A white actor, Mickey Rooney, is also cast in the role of I. Y. Yunioshi — a bucktoothed, cringe-worthy Japanese caricature — which didn’t seem to faze A. H. Weiler of The Times when he reviewed the movie’s premiere. “Like that storied novella by Truman Capote from which it stems,” Mr. Weiler wrote, “it is a completely unbelievable but wholly captivating flight into fancy composed of unequal dollops of comedy, romance, poignancy, funny colloquialisms and Manhattan’s swankiest East Side areas captured in the loveliest of colors.”

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